7 Comments:

A man who consciously risks what Bradley Manning is going through and will go through while giving up a cushy job and lifestyle with a massive salary, in order to tell us stuff he thinks we need to know, is a hero.I don't give a shit what his personal habits are, or what jobs he's held down in the past. This is superficial nonsense, which we are vulnerable to because we're so used to news being about who celebrities are banging today. Cathie, you're being played unless this is meant to be sarcasm.

No, i didn't mean it as sarcasm, i just don't see this fellow as being of high enough intelligence or quality to actually know what he is talking about.And I don't understand how a guy this unqualified, untrained and inept could have the access he claimed to have.But of course, I could be wrong.

Seeing as how CSIS, the RCMP, the PMO, Elections Canada and the host of other so-called security agencies in Canada cannot identify Pierre Poutine, maybe one of them can ask The AMERICANS to point him out...

BemusedLurker (and while they are at it, maybe our Privacy Commissionaire should do a spot audit on all the private data and the access to it that the Cons currently have)

I find it interesting that those who are inferring/making character attacks on Snowdon, are so blind to their cause that they don,t realize they are making their opponents own point.

If a drama queen/traitior/Chinese Spy/loser like they claim/infer that Snowdon is, can so easily get his hands on the material, leak it to the press and abscond to Hong Kong, then none of the data is secure and none of the systems are secure.

The rational comeback to this, is then that it is the Private Subcontractors who failed, but then of course, we have the example from 2008, of the highly esteemed professionals of the NSA, using all this top secret, ultra secret, "only used against foreign terrorists, trust us", access, to record, and share phone sex conversations between US Military overseas, and their partners at home, for their own enjoyment.

If the US ever decides to go back to a Constitutional Democracy, and US Politicians ever get elected who have some guts and sense of responsibility, then in about 10 years, we will see an equivalent of the Church Commission, and I suspect, that what they reveal, (which, like the Church Commission, was only about 20% of the least offensive and anti-Constitutional and illegal activities) we will discover that:

-NSA and other members of the 18 strong "Secret Agency" Community used meta data, phone calls and FISA approved recordings to "encourage" US reps and Senators to vote "the Right Way" and make the "right" Appropriations. After all, Hoover did and so did the ONI and CIA.

-Senior Management of the myriad Sub-Contrators, independently, and in collusion with the Companies themselves, and the stakeholders, (NSA et. al) used phone records, metadata, material obtained in FISA warrants and the US industrial espionage to enrich themselves and their Companies. That's what Merryl Lynch, Rockefeller and Dulles did with CIA and NSA info back in the day. And just like them, it isn't the just Euro being targeted. There are probably a 100 US Companies a year wondering WTF? How did our compeditors get the jump on us and how many people are we going to have to can?

I find it rather interesting that the only people asking the question on how Suxnet, Flame and Duqu got "out", are the CyberSecurity people outside the the US Military/Intelligence/Contractor, Defense Company circles.

As Canadians, we shouldn't be smug about this either. As far as we know so far, the Brits, the Yanks and Our Guys have been sharing the data and intel, a loophole around that whole Not Spying on our own Citizens "guideline".

I was listening to a CBC commentator on the radio who smugly noted that there was probably not the same scope of operation going on in Canada, because we only had 2000 people on the job where the NSA had 20,000. Guess he was bad at math, because thats a difference of a factor of ten, just like the difference between the Canadian and US Populations.